ESCAPE (Living Things Are Warm & Underwater)
by Kokoro-no-Kaji
Summary: Escaping No.6 is the most important thing that ever happened to Shion. It showed him how brutal the world is, and also how beautiful it can be. Shion struggles to deal with everything as Nezumi saves his life over and over, at the cost of killing others, and brings the sheltered No. 6 boy into an all new world called reality. Two-shot. (Part of my Fall 2012 Portfolio)
1. Living Things Are Warm

**Summary:** Escaping No.6 is the most important thing that ever happened to Shion. It showed him how brutal the world is, and also how beautiful it can be. Shion struggles to deal with reality as Nezumi saves his life over and over, at the cost of killing others, and brings the sheltered No. 6 boy into an all new world called reality. Two-shot.

**A/N: **This is another part of that portfolio I was talking about earlier, Journal 5 (witnessing a Death) & Journal 6 (1st line: 'they came out underwater'), if you're curious. The goal was to accomplish massive sensory input about specific events in about 1000 words. I hope you like them!

* * *

Shion was frozen.

He was staring and speechless and standing still in a bubble of cloudy disbelief that muffled the outside world and sharpened the details of the scene before him until they were like etchings on the blade of a knife.

A smoking gun. It had been pointed at Shion's chest, but its aim had been thrown off as the arm supporting it went limp. Nezumi had saved his life. It was the third time in the past hour, but this time Shion couldn't bring himself to say thank you. He couldn't bring himself to say anything.

Nezumi had saved his live by taking another's.

Shion had watched as Nezumi's knife flew from his hand in a perfectly directed arc that slammed the blade into the man's flesh right at the joint of his neck and shoulder. There was no pause, no moment of timelessness. Blood pulsed in regular beats, pumping out of the gaps around the blade without hesitation in a quick and rolling ooze like cake batter being poured from a bowl.

The dying man couldn't scream. A garbled sound escaped him and he convulsed as bile bubbled his through trachea, causing him to fall limply to the cement floor. The man became a body quickly as an eerie stillness crept into his limbs and biology dictated that one last attempt at purging was necessary for the system.

It was vile.

Shion couldn't feel his stomach. His limbs were numb and leaden as his hands lifted to cover his mouth in horror. The sickly sweetness of acid burned his tongue and traced scorching patterns in his nostrils.

A buzzy tremble hovered on his shoulders, an almost-shiver he couldn't shake.

"Y-you . . . you killed him."

"mmh."

"He's dead."

"He sure as hell ain't alive."

Nezumi approached the body. He nudged it with his toe, careful to keep clear of the pools of blood and gunk leaching out of every orifice. The body gave no reaction other than a slight blub of black-brown goo. It resembled the seepage of icing onto a cake when pressure was applied to the limp plastic tube that stored it.

Scenes of baking with his mother flashed through his head, the innocent joy of those ancient-feeling moments set a stark contrast to the tragic horror of the present one.

Shion shuffled forward, barely trusting his legs to hold him. He drew even with Nezumi and the body and fell to his knees. The fabric of his pants soaked up the less viscous excretions, lukewarm for its contact with the icy floor after having dripped from its once-warm hold. Shion didn't particularly notice. Instead he placed his hand on the dead man's chest.

There was no heartbeat, no breath, no movement. No life.

Bending down to pull his knife from the body, Nezumi jerked roughly on the handle. The motion caused the body to shudder with the inanimate reverberations of a force rippling through matter. Shion felt it in jolts under his fingertips.

As Nezumi used a clean patch of the dead man's uniform to clean his knife, Shion reached up to brush his fingers over staring eyes, pulling the eyelids down to leave the man in eternal slumber. The man was still warm, but already there was an unsettling chill to his skin.

"You didn't have to kill him," Shion said quietly.

Nezumi didn't look up from cleaning his knife. "If we manage to escape on his watch, he's better off dead."

"Better off?" Shion demanded, horrified, "How can you say that?"

Pocketing his blade and standing up, Nezumi responded, "You can't torture a body."

"But . . . killing him . . ." Shion could hardly comprehend the idea. "What about his family? What will happen to them, now?"

"You have to stop."

"What?"

Nezumi was looking into the distance as he spoke, half scouting for the other staff members of the facility they were hiding in, and half just to be dramatic and distance himself from the boy trembling at his feet.

"You have to stop thinking about life as something beyond precious. Life is. Death follows. That's all you can count on," Nezumi explained. "You just have to accept that. Living through today is not a certainty, for any number of reasons. Even if you weren't being targeted by the guns of these mercenary corruptions of authority, you could be hit by a bus crossing the street, or your heart could just stop."

"What are you saying?"

Nezumi turned his stare on Shion, his grey eyes as flat and cold as steel, but with a spark of life burning in them. "Life is not a gift to cling to, it is not a guarantee. It is. You are alive and you can either stay that way or not." Nezumi held out his hand, silently commanding Shion to stand. "I'm going to live."

Lifting his hand from the dead man's cold face, Shion hesitated. The sound of footsteps pounding urgently down a distant hall reminded him of the immediate danger. Even the smoothest of prison breaks was fraught with risks, and this one had been anything but smoothe.

A smack resounded through the room as Shion clasped hold of Nezumi's hand with firm resolve. Whatever this was, this philosophical Life and Death thing going on in his head, could deal with it later. Right now, he wanted to live. The man here had died because of Shion's efforts to live, and it only seemed right to make his death count for something.

The warmth of Nezumi's hand as he pulled Shion to his feet was blistering in comparison to the limp chill of the tepid body. Nezumi nodded and jerked Shion after him as he bolted down the hall opposite the direction the sounds of footsteps were coming from.

_Living things are warm._

Shion remembered the words Nezumi had spoken to him a lifetime ago.

He had been right. Such a common-sense thing, when experienced first-hand like this, became quite the marvel.

Shion squeezed Nezumi's hand as they ran, and smiled at its warmth.

* * *

**A/N: **Part 2 will probably go up tomorrow! ^_~


	2. Underwater

**A/N: ** Part 2 of the Escape! Now, my CW Portfolio's Journals aren't exactly related, these just happened to be both be about escaping No. 6, so I lumped them together into one story. Really they're two independent one-shots, but since they're so closely related in subject matter, I decided to put them up in a single story. Enjoy! (Prompt: 'they came out underwater' w/ a focus of sensory details)

* * *

They came out underwater.

After having followed the disused pipeline as their escape route for nearly an hour and having felt the slow drop in temperature and the slower build of air-pressure, Shion should probably have been able to guess.

At the end of the line the pipe made an abrupt downturn of ninety degrees. Water lapped at the pipe's rusty rim just feet away from where Shion now stood, like a glass that had been pushed to the bottom of the sink with a bubble of air still trapped inside.

Nezumi was right beside him, waiting for Shion to catch his breath.

"We're about eighty meters from the surface," he informed. "The water's cold. Be ready for it and don't let any of your air out."

Nodding, Shion approached the lip of the pipe's downturn, taking deep breaths to oxygenate his blood and prepare his lungs to hold their full capacity.

Without acknowledging that he'd seen Shion's nod, Nezumi took his own series of quick deep breaths and then plunged into the murky water. His backsplash washed over Shion. The water was freezing. Shion was certain that the only reason the entire body of water wasn't frozen solid was that the sludge of chemicals the pipe had spent nearly a decade draining into it had lowered the freezing point dramatically.

Still, he had to jump in. Otherwise he would simply die inside the pipe. And he had already decided that he didn't want to die. One more deep breath and Shion dropped himself down the hole to join Nezumi in the glacial-runoff he called 'cold water'.

Nezumi was waiting just above the pipe when Shion burst out of it in a dramatic flood of bubbles. Once he was sure that Shion had spotted him, Nezumi didn't hesitate to make straight for the surface. Shion followed behind with much less efficiency and elegance. Nezumi swam like his namesake, like a rat wriggling through the water in the most streamlined way possible and without regard for the chill. On the other hand, Shion swam like what he was: a person who had only been taught enough about liquid-dynamics to keep himself from drowning in the pool.

The tug of ice in his muscles nearly caused Shion to stop swimming twice, but seeing Nezumi's shadow shrinking above him propelled him onward. Shion's movements were inefficient and ugly, from a swimmer's perspective, but Shion felt graceful beyond words in this underwater world where time was still. His blood pounded slowly in his ears and every other sound was so muted they might have been imagined. The cold of the water quickly sapped his body heat and the numbness that resulted made his leaden limbs tingle.

Bubbles played about his fingertips, like raindrops on marble, and his hair shifted in the swirl of currents in the way leaves did when an oak tree basked in a warm summer breeze. Shion reveled in the muted sensations, the slowed-down elegance of this murky universe. He felt warm and calm, just floating in the deep with light above him, darkness below, and milky shadows all around in shifting shapes and shades.

The water around Shion wasn't blue, it was grey. It wasn't the warm gray of a beloved grandfather's beard, but the cool and noncommittal grey of slate. And yet, it wasn't quite the steely grey of the screen that kept Nezumi's thoughts from reaching his eyes. The grey of the water wasn't nearly as beautiful, or nearly as cold. The fog of silt and pollution that stirred in liquid currents warmed the color up significantly, making it almost inviting despite its cool demeanor.

Shion doubted that Nezumi's eyes could ever be warm and inviting. He imagined how wonderful those severe eyes would look if Nezumi ever lifted that sour expression off his face. It would certainly be a sight to remember.

Smiling at the thought, Shion was struck by another: he wondered if he would ever get to see Nezumi smile. He'd seen Nezumi smirk mockingly, seen him sneer and simper, even laugh in disbelief, but he'd never seen him smile. In all of Shion's acquaintance with Nezumi, the boy had been running for his life, literally dodging bullets at every turn. Theirs was not a friendship formed under circumstances that warranted smiles.

If he really thought about it, Shion might admit that the relationship he had with Nezumi wasn't even strong enough to consider friendship so much as it was kindness and reactive kinship. Shion had saved Nezumi's life, sheltering him from a storm, giving him a hot meal, and stitching up a shallow bullet wound. Now, Nezumi had returned the favor with a jailbreak. The total duration of time they had spent together was less than twelve hours.

Time wasn't important, though.

Shion could understand that much without even thinking about it. They could spend the next ten years together, or they could never see each other again, and Shion would still think of Nezumi as a dear friend in either scenario. Time meant nothing to them.

Especially not here, where seconds dragged on in hours of quiet and bloated minutes passed by unnoticed on fleet-foot currents. Here, where long moments slid across the water in the pulse of a heartbeat and an instant of contact exploded into a brief eternity as Nezumi's firm grip wrapped around Shion's limp wrist and began dragging him upwards.

Water rushed over Shion, rumbling in his ears as white noise and urgency. Colors swirled inside dark shadows at the corners of his eyes and his chest was tight with an ache for air. Being dragged the last ten meters, Shion marveled at Nezumi's determination to keep him alive. This was the fifth time Nezumi had needed to save him during today's little prison break. Shion would have given up ages ago.

Breaking the surface in a triumphal spectacle of splashing, Nezumi yanked Shion over the concrete lip of the man-made pit, hooking his elbows over it securely. Shion spluttered convulsively, wretching up the water he had swallowed.

Meanwhile, Nezumi hauled himself out of the water. When Shion had stopped coughing, Nezumi held out a hand to pull him up. Once they were standing side by side on solid ground that was out of reach for the authorities that would see them dead, Nezumi heaved a sigh.

Then he smirked and gestured to the expanse of desert and the shanty-town in the distance. "Welcome to the West Block, your Majesty."

* * *

**A/N:** I've got one more No.6 story for my portfolio left, and it should be going up by next thursday at the latest!


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